Cider not sweet and no apple flavor

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Standho

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Just brewed a cider for the wife. Apple (Kirkland brand) and ale yeast. I dont taste the apple. Not sweet at all. Could I have ferment too long? i definitely did not pay attention to it.

Can I revive it? Plan in kegging it.
 
Just brewed a cider for the wife. Apple (Kirkland brand) and ale yeast. I dont taste the apple. Not sweet at all. Could I have ferment too long? i definitely did not pay attention to it.

Can I revive it? Plan in kegging it.
Cider tends to ferment dry. Most of the apple flavour is sweetness with a bit of tartness. When fermented dry there is no sweetness and less apple character. If you plan on kegging you have a few option - you can backsweeten with sugar, artificial sugar or apple juice as long as it is in a fridge or stabilise the cider (k-meta and sorbate or pasteurizing) and it will keep.
If you bottle your are limited to artificial sweeteners if you're bottle conditioning.
 
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Dry cider has a wine like flavor. It is normal for it not to be sweet.

If kegging you can easily backsweeten the cider by adding juice or juice concentrate. The easiest way to do this involves knocking out the yeast by adding a very small amount of KMS (campden) and potasium sorbate. Do a search and you should be able to find the instructions.
 
Yes, getting it to taste the way you want it to be can be a bit of a mission. My approach generally is to let it ferment all the way down then add back sugar or apple juice (if I am really clever, rather than add back sweetness, I will stop it from fermenting when it is down to the sweetness level that I want).

As you plan kegging, then no need to add sugar for carbonation. I use sealed bottles and hot waterbath pasteurising to stop fermentation after carbonation has built up, but the chemical approach also works. While I use heat pasteurising to get a "sweet" carbonated cider, Andrew Lea's book suggests a method for doing this without capped bottles (to avoid "bottle bombs") so I imagine that the result would be a sweetened cider ready to keg.

As a guide, I don't like my cider too sweet so 10 -20g of residual sugar per litre (i.e. SG 1.004 -1.008) which is about the same as up to a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of coffee, which is fine by my tastes. Conventionally, sweeter ciders can have in the order of 30 - 40 g/L of sugar (FG 1.012 - 1.015).

The other "taste trick" is to add some malic acid (this is the prominent acid in apple juice) to get a bit of "apple bite". This can be done simply by taste by adding acid to a small sample (say 100ml or so) then extrapolating this up to the whole batch. I imagine that the Kirkland juice is mostly from dessert apples which will typically have a high pH and a low acidity level.

A "good" flavour balance is generally around a pH of 3.6 and a Total Acidity of 0.5 - 0.7%, but you can sort of get there by taste if you aren't able to measure.

Good luck!
 
All of the above are good advice. đź‘Ť You may also want to consider back sweetening with thawed concentrate in the serving glass. I find about a teaspoonful per 16 oz to be good. Only done one batch of this so far so YMMV, but I found that Lalemand TF-6 yeast has a nice, cooked apple taste despite fermenting dry.
 
Everyone's advice on stalling the yeast and back-sweetening fits what I have learned so far as well. I will normally hit the batch with K-Meta and Sorbate, per wine instructions for batch size. I use one ~350gm frozen juice concentrate or 1 quart of juice to backsweeten at that point. I normally only do this with a pear cider, as my wife likes the apple ciders dry and wild-fermented.
 
Just brewed a cider for the wife. Apple (Kirkland brand) and ale yeast. I dont taste the apple. Not sweet at all. Could I have ferment too long? i definitely did not pay attention to it.

Can I revive it? Plan in kegging it.
Just using store brand juice will give you a bland result. When I make cider I start with store brand juice and when the initial fermentation is done I add 2-3 pounds of a variety of flavorful apples.
 
Store apple juice is made mostly from sweet eating apples, so it makes a bland cider. Cider apples include more tart (acidic) and bitter (tannin) flavors. So I try to make my store apple juice more like cider apple juice by adding malic acid and tannin. I also add some oak in secondary. That adds some complexity to the flavor.
 
Even after fermentation is complete, you could still add some malic acid and oak or tannin powder. With additions, put in a little bit at a time so that you don't add too much. It's easy to put in, but difficult to take out.

I also backsweeten my cider just a little bit to bring out the apple flavor.
 
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